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The Key to Empowering your Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday

What holds marketing teams back from accomplishing great things? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles the big challenges many internal marketing teams face, and outlines a way to bring structure and empowerment back to your marketers.

Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

The Key to Empowering your Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about what holds marketing teams back from being able to accomplish great things inside of companies, and for external marketing teams that are on an agency or consulting basis, but really oftentimes internally.

So this, I've got here my six little friends. This one, this guy is kind of awkward. His back is a little out of whack. But that's okay. He's just a stick figure. He's probably feeling just fine.

The challenge for these guys is that they constantly need their work reviewed. They're kind of in the weeds, in the trenches doing marketing activities, building content, trying to get that content shared and linked to, trying to earn rankings and traffic, trying to buy advertising, trying to influence the website and the marketing materials, make the conversion rate higher, do all these things to promote the marketing funnel improving. Yet they're constantly changing course, sometimes daily, sometimes even hourly. Boss comes in, it's sort of like, "No, no, no, don't do that anymore. Focus on this thing. No, wait, I know I told you to do that, but we don't need that anymore. We need this other thing."

They're not empowered to make decisions, not even about their own work. They really have to get constantly reviewed. Someone comes and gives them feedback on everything they do. I've been this marketer myself before. Especially as a consultant, you're oftentimes in this position. You don't have that empowerment to make great decisions.

But there's a way to fix this, and it's an architecture I want to share with you that's been really powerful for me and for a number of other companies that have adopted this and that have shared it too. So the idea is basically that what we want to do is we want to take all the things that the company wants to accomplish today, in the future, in the far, far flung future, and we want to connect that all the way down to what the marketing team is actually working on today, right now. But it takes a little bit of work, and it takes a lot of transparency, and it takes some thinking. If you don't have this architecture yet, you should give it a try. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

A big company vision is a great starting point. I know many small and medium businesses don't even really have a great big company vision. But if you can imagine one, if you can put one on there, "We want to be Cleveland, Ohio's best marketing agency, and we define best as our clients are the happiest, we have the most clients, and we have the highest revenues in the city." Okay, great, now you've got a company vision. Moz's vision, for example, is to help people do better marketing. Tesla's vision is to transform how the world is transported. NASA has an organizational vision to explore space. So you can get a company vision.

So let's say it is, "Help people do better marketing." From that flows things that you're going to do over the next few years. It could be five years, it could be just two or three years, but the mission that you have. I'm going to go back to Tesla again because I love Tesla's five-year mission. Tesla's five-year mission is to "Power the transformation from gas to electric vehicles and to become the world's leading car company by doing that." So become the world's leading company by powering the transformation from gas to electric.

Okay. Then, based on that mission, that thing that you want to accomplish over the next few years, you have a BHAG. A BHAG is Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I know it sounds a little funny, but this acronym is actually quite important, and so are all the letters in there. Big because you want it to be hard to achieve. My favorite thing that people say about a BHAG is,
"It's out of reach, but not out of sight." A goal that is out of reach, I can't see us accomplishing it today. My God, it's almost hard to imagine that we accomplished it, but not completely out of sight.

So perhaps Tesla would say that their BHAG is to be the world's number one auto manufacturer in ten years or in five years. That means that they have to build so many cars and sell so many cars that they are the world's leading car company through number of cars on the road. For Moz, our BHAG is one million people subscribing to our platform. For your Cleveland, Ohio consulting agency, it might be successfully keeping and maintaining 100 paying customers at $5,000 a month or more for a full year, nonstop. Whatever it is, it has to be definable, easily definable, easily measurable, and powerful, something that people can get behind.

I'll go back to NASA again. That moon mission that they had, in the 1960s NASA had the moon mission and the BHAG for the moon mission was, "Put a man on the surface of the moon and return him safely to the earth." Super measurable, super definable, incredibly powerful to get behind. If you're doing marketing for that, you can see that big vision and that big goal very clearly. Then from there, from these two, I'm going to take our mission and our BHAG, and I'm going to define a list of strategic goals, things we need to accomplish in order to get these things done. But they're going to be things that we do over the next 6 to 12 months, just 6 to 12 months, just the next little while. This is really powerful because those strategic goals should flow down to everything else that the company does.

So if, for example, I say, "Hey, in order to sell more cars, Tesla needs to open Tesla dealerships in 500 cities over the next 12 months, and here's the list of cities." Okay, that's a strategic goal. Now we've got to go get that done. We need to figure out people who know how to open stores and people who know about real estate, and we need to have a bunch of investment dollars that we can put it in these things. We need to figure out how long it is before we open a dealership before that actually turns into sales for us. We need to hire all the salespeople. We need to build a process for that. Huge list of things that come from those, but the strategic goal is very simple. "Open stores in 500 cities."

At Moz, one of our strategic goals is to increase the retention of our Pro subscribers. Build stuff. Make stuff in the product that makes people want to stick around and use Moz longer. Okay, these are strategic goals.

Then, from there, now we really start to get into the nitty-gritty with the marketing goals being tied to these company goals, and this is such a powerful architecture. It just removes all kinds of barriers, because now I can go and I can build a process like this, right here. So I take a goal that the team is trying to accomplish, and I translate that into what my actual marketing task is around it. Then I have the process and the people that I need for that goal. So actually, I'm going to use my checkboxes that I actually made.

I define my goal, I get the process and people I need, I figure out how we define success, what the measurable elements are. Maybe it's, "Hey, we need to broaden our brand's reach." We want to have more people exposed to the Moz brand, and so therefore, we are going to define a goal as half a million people following our Twitter account and 100,000 people following our Google + account, and maybe a million people following us on Facebook and whatever those things are.

Then you have those metrics-based targets. So those could be website visitor statistics. They could be conversions. It could be an ROI number. It could be a cost number. Many times a strategic goal will be to reduce cost to a certain amount, and then you have these goals. "Hey, we need to reduce customer acquisition costs. We need to find channels that don't cost as much." Oftentimes, inbound channels don't cost as much, things like SEO and email marketing, opt-in email marketing, community building, and content and those kinds of things, that's a great way to reduce customer acquisition costs. It could be a marketing goal, and you figure out who the process and people are behind that. We may need a writer. We're going to need someone who is a marketing analyst to do all the statistics work. We're going to figure out how we measure success. That's going to be measured through number of people acquired through these lower-cost channels. We're going to have metrics-based targets. We're going to say we want to acquire 20% of our customers through non-paid channels by the end of 2013.

Great. Now you have something so amazing. You have marketers that can see the big picture. They can see all the way. They know everything that's connected here, and that means that they know how their work matters. I can't tell you what a change in attitude you get when you understand how your work matters versus wondering why you're pushing buttons. It's just a remarkable change. Now, those same people can navigate project complexity without needing someone over their shoulder, looking all the time at their work, making sure that they're doing the right thing, reviewing, because they can see that full connection.

You might have someone who reviews the work at the end of the cycle or is in a project planning meeting with them, maybe a manager or a senior leader or something like that, and that's fine and that's a good thing. But you don't need to be in the weeds with your team anymore, and because they're empowered, they can choose how they work best, figure out what makes them most effective, and then they can execute on projects.

I urge you to give this a try. It won't take that long, especially if you've got some of these bigger things already defined, and it can really move the needle on how your marketing team works.

All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.

71 Comments

In a follow up to this, can you publish a case study from a brand that executed a similar process to empower their marketing in the way you're describing in your video? Seeing the results and key learnings from a brand who did this would create valuable context. Thanks.

As a head of marketing I always try have our team follow a similar process to what is being discussed in today's WFB. Our daily marketing activities have to bear in mind our agreed processes, departmental goals and yes organisational goals (probably more on a 1yr to 3yr basis, coming from the software industry who really knows where they will be in 5 years).

Review and reaction to KPI results plays a big part in our process which you mention lightly at the end Rand. Which is great but I think for us the review section (at marketing department level) keeps us flexible and adaptable to achieving company goals.

As part of 'marketing empowerment' I would also want to mention that marketers need to (at the very least) by aware of other functional dept. level goals, for instance the sales or operational departments. There may be marketing teams out there who need to day-to-day data/information from the sales team and others who just need maybe a review from sales on a weekly/monthly basis. You can't really just sit there and say 'Hey! we're doing fine, we're empowered and we are sticking to the knitting here, not our fault the sales guys did not reach target! - (that might be a bit too representative of a typical Anglo-Saxon business but you get the idea).

So yes by all means a level of autonomy and empowerment from senior management is healthy and builds self-reliance. However inter-department/ functional dependency and reliance may either hinder this. If all functions of an organisation are working in harmony and all are achieving their own KPIs great but if not then the level of empowerment a marketing team/department has to fluctuate and adapt. I think overall I'm saying it's a dynamic and fluid situation and with empowerment comes great responsibility (that is until something goes wrong elsewhere in the business and it can suddenly evaporate).

I think Rand just outline the need of empowering the marketing team to fit the whole issue in the limited time. Otherwise this thing may need a complete book to properly define the topic. Empowering here doesn't mean absolute power with full rigidness. In big organizations, departmental goal is set in line with the organizational vision. So, goal of each department complement goals of other departments. In ideal situation, inter-department dependency can never hinder this process. Otherwise, you have to redefine the whole thing. Flexibility in defining goal and target is a common issue to adjust with market condition or other factors and hence the same thing will be applied to the degree of empowerment given to any team.

I've been through so many strategic planning efforts in the past 30 years it almost hurts to think about them.
They always go wrong. And for the longest time, I was always surprised when they did.

Then I realized that by going wrong, a strategic plan points to a problem that needs attention, an assumption too heavily biased by wishful thinking.

And then I ask my self why. Why did the plan go astray just here, why just now? When planning meets reality, our assumptions are exposed. When our assumptions are exposed, we have a remarkable opportunity to learn and adapt.

While I agree that plans can go astray, they are essential. They are the blueprints to your business. I'm sure any builder can tell you that no building ever gets built without any modification to the original plans. Things happen. Lessons are learned. Adjustments have to be made. Still, you have to start with a plan. I mean, you could start to build a house without a plan, but what do you think it might look like in the end if you hadn't started with at least a solid idea of what you wanted it to look like before you began?

So when you say "They always go wrong..." I think you have to think about what "wrong" means. If "wrong" means the business had to adjust and make a course correction along the way...I'd say that's to be expected. I think perhaps it would be more accurate to say "They always go differently from exactly as planned." I don't think that makes the original plan wrong. It just means that when the plan was written up it couldn't possibly take into account unforeseeable events.

A pilot with a flight plan isn't going to doggedly stick to that flight plan if there's a major hurricane in front of the plane that could be avoided by making a course correction. Still, if the pilot navigates the plane safely to the end destination, the flight is considered successful.

Plans are blueprints. They aren't written in stone. But it is essential when embarking on anything great to have an idea of what the end goal is. Without that, you have no idea what you are shooting for.

First you need a vision :)
A vision wich is clearly visible. With a clearly visible goal, Hmm - that's what I say to some of my clients with no visions, no content and even no keyword ideas for ther website. I think some of my clients don't even thought about why they are what they are - and mostly not even what they do and why they do it

That vision - how stupid it sounds ever - helps a lot, finding the difference between you and yout competitors.

I've dealt with many similar clients. It's not just enough to have an idea, you have to know how to put that idea into practice and decide what you want your company to mean to the outside world. It seems like a such a simple concept but it's something a lot of site owners lose site of.

Undoubtedly anything without a clear vision can never succeed. Apart from that I have personally felt that empowering the marketing team to take the appropriate decision and periodic review of their decisions, help them to achieve their goal. Sometimes we just need to make them aware about the other side of their decision.

I think this is a great strategy. The trouble may be with getting buy-in from executives (regardless of whether the marketing team is in-house or a consulting agency). Some businesses are narrow-minded and think that each department lives in its own little box.

I was once scolded by a client for sharing some basic web stats with someone in "the wrong department." They kept their departments in separate compartments. :-) Coincidentally, they went out of business a couple of years ago.

This video would be good for executives and decision-makers to see. It can be hard to implement change, especially if it's "the little guy" asking for the change. But with the right selling points (better marketing with higher ROI), I would think most execs would hear you out.

Wow Rand, clearly out of box thinking for project execution. But you know one thing this is possible if client for which we are going to work understand the power of proper project execution which takes a little bit long time but 100% helpful(as you described). Say a client say that we want to rank no. 1 within 6 months in Google search result, they are looking in hurry. They usually tends to move towards other company who promises to give Rank more quickly with the banners like :

"Get 1000 customer per day within 2 months" :) BANG

Ya nearly impossible to provide quality traffic within that span of time.

But ya if the client got convinced that he/she wants good return in long term then the organized ideas that you said in video is far more effective. Hope clients would understand the power of organized work flow.

And yes if the goal and mission is clearly defined along with proper set of actions to do then it would lead to better investment time in work. How? of course -

As always, great post Rand. I really like the part about setting definable goals. Not the how to just setting what needs to get done and trusting people you hire to meet those goals. Micromanaging is way to stressful on everyone and if you get the right people in place its also a waste of time and a hinderance.

I have been trying to get my company to adopt this type of strategy with our clients for quite some time. Unfortunately there are many people in the way of the end client from myself and the team I work with. One of the sad things is that this type of marketing plan helps the over all brand, but some clients are even agencies are still focusing on rankings, W3 errors, code bloat and pretty much every older SEO tactics that doesn't really help you convert new clients. Do you have any suggestions on ways of helping people see a different way to approach the marketing for their company, when you don't directly have access to the client?

hmmmmm this problem will persist for a little bit long time, since clients are not supposed to follow the trends happening in internet marketing. All we need to do convince the clients, show them the power of organized workflow for long term success. :)

Seems like every time I watch Whiteboard Friday it makes me want to stop all other activities for the day and implement what Rand is talking about for my clients or for my own business. As I look to focus my own business on bigger and better this presentation helps set a solid overview for my employees as well as focusing in my clients on ways they can improve. In terms of reaching your Goals at Moz, how about a Moz tool that allows you to create this document on the fly? Pro members get company branding etc? I'd love to be able to help some of my clients with this as that almost seems like a bigger barrier in my process than doing the actual work. Nice presentation as usual.

Turn employees into brand ambassadors. Get them keyed up about what you’re doing. And convey them into the circle. You might just be amazed at the value they bring. The ideas they have will often wow you. good job.

Thanks so much for working on this post. Not only does it provide a clear, simple overview of some key points in business development, but the emphasis on helping your marketing team understand what their role is in the business and through that connecting them with purpose is crucial (I believe) to long-term growth.

Overall business acumen is something that seems to be lacking among many digital marketers, and those that can see the bigger picture of how their work fits in to overall strategic objectives (and see the results of their efforts!) are going to make better decisions, enjoy their work more, and provide higher-quality results.

I believe it's also very timely as many organizations (especially large ones) are suffering from marketing silos within their companies. This is extremely detrimental to their overall health as I believe businesses need to be more and more integrated across all divisions in order to achieve scaleable, long-term success - especially in marketing. Getting more marketers excited about this integration is a great way to help that change occur, so thank you for taking the time on this to paint a bigger picture. Hopefully, some of us will get more interested in pushing beyond the marketing silo.

Great WBF! Motivating a SEO team or copywriters to be creative and get stuff done can be very difficult. Especially when the content is boring. I've always said that traditional rewards, like cash bonuses, aren't effective motivational tools. Empowering a marketing team, or any workforce, can be very effective.

For example, Google have a '20% time'. The 20% is a portion of work hours in which employees at Google can work on anything they’d like. Sounds crazy but Google has stated that some of its best inventions come from the advances made by employees during their 20% time.

Another Exciting WBF!! Lots of material for new smaller companies and Project Managers. Always make the strategic goal of 10 years for you and for your company and always make the vision clear and understiood.

Best advice I was ever given to understand vision was "The Vision you look forward to, should be the legacy you want to look back on." That statement really clarified something that I had previously felt was a bit of wishy-washy corp speak. I think everyone who is driven wants to leave some kind of significant legacy behind. Name what that is and you have your vision.

Very well structured plan to follow especially for small business organization. For any business organization it is quite necessary to make business objectives, proper strategy to follow them and then to think deeply that what steps need to taken to accomplish these goals and plans. Thanks for sharing the post. Really a nice one.

This is really helpful for me and for the other seo marketers. There is one request from my side I want to see a session on content writing; as I am new in this field and I need some guidelines. Wish you a great success in the future.

Awareness is important when it comes to empowering people. You need to make them aware of how important the value of their work is. A lot of good thigns can actually start from this.

Through awareness they become even more conscious of how their roles fits in to the big picture giving them a sense of accountability and pride with their task, helps them with innovation, team work, etc.

In any company, marketing dept is the main key. if you want to move forward then you have good project managers and strategic and analysis managers. Suppose all skilled employees you have but your strategic is not fruitful for company then what happen? I would recommend that make your strategic for 5 yrs rather than for 10 yrs or more.

this goes back to basic of planning your overall Marketing strategy, create a well define plan stick to it and measure its impact to improve your next plan. Today's Marketing world is based on Collaboration or big dollar spending, and you are so right that using the working force insights and capabilities will work for long term of an effective strategy.

Great topic Rand... a bit more of the company and management side of SEO. To empower the marketing team, focus is needed! A company mission or vision delivers that goal that you can really sink your teeth into! Not only will this structure empower the marketing team, but the entire company will realize they are a vital part of the mission statement!

Randfish, I am not quite sure if i should ask this you but after this topic I feel like I should and I was wondering if you can also give tips on 'how to recover marketing team' from disappointments. It's very common that campaign doesn't give results or we don't get enough opening rate from email campaigns, display banners doesn't get expected clicks and i am not even mentioning yet frustration of poor SEO results. I might sound a bit negative but poor results are hidden depression among digital people and i see that more every time i visit digital marketeers networking events (in London). I know that testing and trying to making it better etc makes it better but I'd like to know and i believe there will be other marketeers would want to hear your recommendation.

Sometimes a tactic or an initiative fails, and that's totally OK. The key lies in understanding why it failed:

- Did we have the wrong strategy?
- Did we choose the wrong tactic?
- Was is not a match for the audience we're trying to reach?
- Was the message unclear or not powerful enough?
- Was the medium/channel wrong?
- Was the execution poor?
- Was it timing?
- Something else?

If you can really identify the cause of failure, you can learn from it. That learning is, in my opinion, worth the failure and often times nearly as valuable as success (so long as you apply it to future campaigns/projects).

of-course we should have necessary tools for executing those plans and strategies Let's say we have created a great post and want to spread towards intended readers and suddenly we found oopsss we don't have enough followers or fans. It means we should create those tools and resources that will help to make the promotion much easier and faster i.e, we need to increase genuine followers and subscribers. This is just a case study. I think it is right. or is there any other way RAND?

' If you can really identify the cause of failure, you can learn from it' I think this is where I get stuck most of the time. It is as hard as identifying what causes the penguin hit or which website is taking me down.

2. Any time someone mentions any kind of X-year-plan, I can't help but think of Dignan's plan in Bottle Rocket, but this was way more useful. Haha.

3. And, yes, anything you can do to unleash the potential of your team is a good thing. I can't quite remember who did it, but I remember watching a video of a couple of people discussing how to solve this same problem by, instead of asking permission, start using the phrase "unless I hear otherwise." It allows people to work without having to constantly be reviewed, keeps the momentum moving, and empowers people to do their work how they best see fit. As long as you have trust in the people you've hired, tips like that and the things Rand discussed here can be a powerful tool for generating a great flow and staying on track to accomplish goals you set for yourself.

Especially for the old 'brick & mortar' companies this will make their transition to digital successful. Vision from the top , empowering the experts can successfully assist in transforming/digitizing the organisation

Aha :) , I can dance today with your post, some where i was lacking in this plan. Strategies, plans play a very important role for any business. If the Goal look clearly then we can give the more potential.

I have always looked up at great managers and now that I am one in a corporate setting I started to do just that when given projects - give them a little more information so that they can see the big picture and make them feel like they are a big part of the project. That eliminates the constant micromanaging and they will even support you when things seem unclear to others. Great post!

Rand, solid advice. A lot of businesses have structure issues. Many don't have a visions statement or real goals. Some even pretend to have vision statement, but it's really just a pretty plaque on the wall no one cares about.

I think you covered the importance of vision, in a introductory way, very well. The problem is most of us aren't in a position of authority to put this process into place. I mean, we can send your video to the higher ups :)

There is nothing more enjoyable than working towards a goal with real benchmarks for success without arbitrary points of failure, which I think you covered nicely. There is also nothing more enjoyable than using my own creativity and sweat to help a company succeed without being hindered by micro-management along the way.

Thanks again for sharing. It is encouraging to hear when other people "get it".

This points to the fact that businesses, whether marketing agencies or others, need to be just as strategic with their business as they are with their clients.

Certainly when working with a client you first try to get the full picture, understand the goals, objectives and outcomes that they want to see happen. From there, you then outline the specific way in which you would go about making this happen, maybe in the form of a proposal. In that same proposal you will tell them, this is how we will measure out success. In the end, everyone is equally informed, empowered and excited to produce.

One thing I have observed is that some love the weeds in spite of the best efforts of management to empower. That takes coaching to change, but this WBF is definitely a great place to start!

The one question I would like to draw out from this WBF is, what are the specific remarkable changes that a business can experience by doing this? Rand can you provide us some more detail on this?

To my mind, ‘magic’ is the hard-to-define quality of the things that stir up mystical feelings like amazement, curiosity, imagination, and above all wonder.

Magic is that which renders something beautiful in a spiritual sense. It is that which makes one feel as if the world is more than it is presently understood to be, and yet at the same time the world is working itself out in a good and beautiful way.

Magic underlies the relationship between us, and the greater immensities of birth and death. Thus the experience of being in the presence of something magical is an empowering, uplifting experience. Magic, understood this way, contributes meaning to life.